It's hard to believe how spot-on this is to what I've been looking for. I thought about coding something almost exactly like this, for the exact same reasons as the author describes.
I see this is from earlier in the year; I've certainly googled for this kind of thing a few times since then, and never got this as a result.
People who grow up using these sorts of bespoke software are gonna have some pretty weird nostalgia. "Hey when you were a toddler did you ever play with a paint app where the fill tool created flashing swirly patterns? ...no?"
I have a friend who's dad is a good carpenter, put a whole second story on his house, did the flooring and made a lot of furniture. He said it was about 4th grade before he found out that there were stores where people went and bought furniture instead of just making their own.
My parents aren't especially skilled carpenters, electricians plumbers, or HVAC technicians, but they managed to be good enough at those things. At sixteen my girlfriend's family was flabbergasted to learn that I had never seen my parents hire such people.
My dad was also a pirate, and I had a similar experience when I learned that you could buy VHS tapes with pictures of the lion king on them, rather than just "Lion King" in dad's handwriting.
On the subject of nostalgic paint apps, I distinctly remember one of the Kid Pix drawing tools/games that I had growing up... what a weird piece of software that was!
Using the pattern on the top left of the array of patterns I clicked several times and got a setup where it was still flood filling after maybe 10 minutes.
Unlike all the other times I'd tried where it quickly ended up with black or white dominating and then filling the whole area (except once when it became all white except for a single black pixel) this ended up with the whole area filled with a checkerboard pattern except for a jagged fault line running from top to bottom. The waves of filling would cause small changes to the fault line, and occasionally a small island of black or white would form and then be taken over by the checkerboard.
I was going to let it go for a lot longer but accidentally did the "back" gesture on my mouse bringing me back here. I've tried several times since then but that is the only time I got something that was long running.
Anyone else get any interesting long running ones?
What a wonderful looking piece of software :) My child is far past toddler age but I shall keep this in mind as a gift for friends of mine that are about to have children.
I love this! May your baby grow up weird and unique like cellular automata rules, thinking globally and acting locally.
It's weird like the cellular automata painting system I've been working on for a long time, which I rewrote in JavaScript a while ago, and is in serious need to rewriting, but runs pretty fast now anyway in spite of itself.
Norman Margolus and Tommaso Toffoli's "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling" from MIT Press is one of my favorite books of all time! It shows lots of peculiarly indented Forth code.
I recorded this demo for Norman Margolus, one of the creators of the CAM-6 and authors of the book about it, so it starts showing the book, gets pretty technical, and dives deep into some forth code, but then it gets into the demo and on to somẻ fun heat diffusions about here:
Here's where I demonstrate some meta rules that let you paint which of 16 dithered heat diffusion kernels to run per cell, that I use for storytelling, then an even weirder demo of painting with Ridiculous Instruction Set Code parallel cellular automata machine language with many diverse rules (not all diffusion, including life, brian's brain, cow spot anneal, torben's foamy anneal, 8 directional data moving "busses", and others):
Also here's some stuff about granular sound synthesis with a "musical gas" cellular automata, babies should love it! Includes farting and laughing gas!
I see this is from earlier in the year; I've certainly googled for this kind of thing a few times since then, and never got this as a result.
Thanks OP for posting.
My dad was also a pirate, and I had a similar experience when I learned that you could buy VHS tapes with pictures of the lion king on them, rather than just "Lion King" in dad's handwriting.
Anyways, you've found someone. Or at least someone who used to.
OP you’re amazing. It’s nice to see kids today can grow up to exposed to the same hardware I’m assuming you (well, me too, so us) grew up with!
Unlike all the other times I'd tried where it quickly ended up with black or white dominating and then filling the whole area (except once when it became all white except for a single black pixel) this ended up with the whole area filled with a checkerboard pattern except for a jagged fault line running from top to bottom. The waves of filling would cause small changes to the fault line, and occasionally a small island of black or white would form and then be taken over by the checkerboard.
I was going to let it go for a lot longer but accidentally did the "back" gesture on my mouse bringing me back here. I've tried several times since then but that is the only time I got something that was long running.
Anyone else get any interesting long running ones?
Edit: I bought a copy and I'm having a blast!
These screenshots look awesome. Definitely checking this one out. Thanks for this!
It's weird like the cellular automata painting system I've been working on for a long time, which I rewrote in JavaScript a while ago, and is in serious need to rewriting, but runs pretty fast now anyway in spite of itself.
Norman Margolus and Tommaso Toffoli's "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling" from MIT Press is one of my favorite books of all time! It shows lots of peculiarly indented Forth code.
https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf
I recorded this demo for Norman Margolus, one of the creators of the CAM-6 and authors of the book about it, so it starts showing the book, gets pretty technical, and dives deep into some forth code, but then it gets into the demo and on to somẻ fun heat diffusions about here:
https://youtu.be/LyLMHxRNuck?t=531
Here's where I demonstrate some meta rules that let you paint which of 16 dithered heat diffusion kernels to run per cell, that I use for storytelling, then an even weirder demo of painting with Ridiculous Instruction Set Code parallel cellular automata machine language with many diverse rules (not all diffusion, including life, brian's brain, cow spot anneal, torben's foamy anneal, 8 directional data moving "busses", and others):
https://youtu.be/LyLMHxRNuck?t=1398
More info that I'm hoping to cover in a future Repo Show video with Norman:
CAM6 — Don's cellular-automata machine simulator (firsthand)
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
What I Made With Your Magic — the CAM6 Demo, for Norman
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Also here's some stuff about granular sound synthesis with a "musical gas" cellular automata, babies should love it! Includes farting and laughing gas!
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...